My Users report getting zero results for search queries in one of our sharepoint sites. Even though we know that the item exists in the database! What changed? This was working without a hitch previously.

Ah I remembered that this happened right after i had installed digital certificates and required HTTPS traffic. Could the https:// protocol have affected the search results?

A look at the application log shows:

The start address

A look at the Central Admin using Sharepoint central admin/operations/services on server/windows sharpoint service search, I found the entries as follows:

However, the SSEE server was NOT installed. This must have been an old entry. So I recreated the search database and called it WSS_Content_Search DB with collation of Latin1_general_c1_AS_KS_WS.

Once the WSS_Content_Search DB was fully re-populated, I still could not get any results from enterprise search in Sharpoint.

So I also did “alternate access maps” to include https://
(see http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepoint/archive/2007/03/06/what-every-sharepoint-administrator-needs-to-know-about-alternate-access-mappings-part-1.aspx for a complete explanation)